This invention relates to equipment for floor maintenance machines and, in particular, to fluid supply systems for supplying cleaning fluid to a brush deck.
Floor maintenance machines or scrubbers provide a way to clean dirty floor surfaces. Typically, an operator directs a floor maintenance machine over the surface to be cleaned by steering or guiding the floor maintenance machine. With the help of a supplied cleaning fluid, an oscillating pad or rotating brushes of the floor maintenance machine can directly contact the floor surface to loosen debris that is on the surface of the floor.
The cleaning fluid is supplied to the brush deck from a clean water tank using a fluid supply system. Typically, this system involves one or more fluid lines that connect the clean water tank to the fluid outlet at the brush deck. Depending on the particular fluid supply system, there may be intermediate components which help to provide the cleaning agent to the fluid stream.
In many conventional fluid supply systems, the water is mixed with a soap or detergent. In such systems, the operator may measure the amount of soap or detergent directly place it in the clean water tank to mix it with the water. Alternatively, some systems may have a separate soap or detergent well and the soap or detergent may be introduced into the fluid as the fluid is transported through the fluid line.
More recently, some floor cleaning machines have replaced traditional soap-based systems with ozone-generation systems. In many cases, the water itself is processed to create ozone-containing or highly oxygenated water. Such systems are of increasing interest because they are chemical-free and the oxygenated water can have cleaning power comparable to bleach.
Soap- or detergent-based systems and oxygen-based systems clean different types of surfaces with different levels of efficacy. For example, soap- or detergent-based systems are good at cleaning up oily or sticky messes whereas oxygen-based systems are good at cleaning up highly traveled areas where bacterial reduction may be of greater interest.
To date, it has been problematic to combine the features of these two cleaning paradigms without undercutting some of the features of the other. Further, while traditional soap-based fluid systems and ozone-generation systems each have their own benefits, they also highly dependent on correct user operation. Given the disparate paradigms for operation and that it is inevitable that not all operators will operate the machines as intended, the current state of the art is fraught with problems relating to the attempted combination (intentional or non-intentional) of these technologies.
For example, many systems operate by creating ozone or oxygenated water using electrochemical processes on the water itself as the water is transported from the clean water tank to the outlet near the brush deck. It is very easy for an unknowing operator to mistakenly mix soap or detergent into the clean water tank with the water, resulting in damage to the equipment which creates the ozone-containing or highly oxygenated water. Even a few mistakes of this kind can require servicing of the floor cleaning machine, costing hundreds or thousands of dollars, and/or lead to non-effective operation of the machine because the primary cleaning mechanism is degraded by improper use.
Still further, some oxygen-based systems may introduce ozone into the water stream without processing the water itself (e.g., using an ozone generator which places the ozone, created from atmospheric gas, into the water stream). It may be acceptable to utilize soapy water in those systems, because doing so would not affect the mode of ozone generation which is injected into the water stream from the clean water tank rather than created from it. However, the use of soapy water largely defeats the purpose of such oxygen-based cleaning systems in the first place because the benefits of chemical-free, soap-less operation from using the oxygen-based system is subverted. While it may be possible to switch the clean water tank between soapy and non-soapy water, doing so takes time and requires the clean water tank to be drained and its contents to be replaced.
Accordingly, there is a continuing need for a floor cleaning machine that can operate using both oxygen-based and soap-based cleaning fluids without comprising operation or efficiency of the overall machine.